The Pool by the Falls
by Dorothy Crane

That it still exists is a miracle. For the past three decades I have watched the old swimming pool by the falls on the Sawkill withstand the assault of weather and somehow escape updated building codes, EPA regulations, and the general urge to "clean things up." Sometimes being overlooked is a blessing.

The pool is just a two-minute drive from my Bard College office. The short downhill walk from the college water treatment plant to the Sawkill (locally known as the Bard Stream) doesn't even require sneakers. The road sweeps gently through the woods, to the left, to the right, and then suddenly a cool damp mist touches my face, the roar of crashing water fills my ears, and the air is illuminated by green-tinged sunlight sneaking through tree leaves. The outside world has disappeared. On the left the stream rushes relentlessly over three large sandstone stair steps as it tumbles towards the Hudson River—splitting, rejoining, throwing itself upward and outward—until it lands below, quiets, and continues downstream at a temporarily slower pace. On the right the old concrete pool, aboveground and once stream-fed, sits stolidly near the water's edge, almost like a bunker keeping watch over the falls. Constructed of tougher stuff than today's here-today-gone-tomorrow materials, this stubborn structure appears to have no intention of crumbling. With the exception of a few cracks, the old pool is composed and dignified, still enclosed by the rusted but original metal railing, ready for its next reincarnation.

It's been through several lives already. The pool was originally part of land owned by Christian Zabriskie. Over the years Zabriskie was generous to Bard. He gave the college some valuable manuscripts, a few first editions, and even a leaf from a Gutenberg Bible, but his most valuable gift was Blithewood, the 825-acre estate he deeded to Bard in 1951. With the property came this swimming pool, lovingly landscaped into a steep hillside on the bank of the Sawkill, overlooking the falls.

The pool was an integral part of summer life at Bard for 20 years after the college acquired it. A green canopy of overhanging trees shaded the surrounding wooden deck. Faculty sat in their lawn chairs, smoking cigarettes, drinking gin and tonics, and discussing politics and the latest college gossip. Children perched tentatively on the edge at the shallow end, carefully watched by parents because even the shallow end was pretty deep. Students did cannonballs off the diving board. My husband's friend put his kayak in the pool to practice rollovers. There was no chlorine smell, only the fresh. churned-up mist generated by the falls and the roar of the cascading water. It felt more like a swimming hole than a pool. My husband and his friends who grew up on and around the campus describe the pool as a sort of Garden of Eden. When he and I were first getting to know each other I had the sense that meeting the stream and the pool was almost as important as my meeting his parents.

The pool closed not long after those gold-drenched summers. The prevailing gossip was that faculty wives were upset by the Bard students swimming naked, and they no longer felt comfortable there with small children. The real reason was that the pool required a major filter overhaul to meet health codes. It cost too much money to keep the pool open.

And so began the next chapter. The pool was drained. Students (both naked and clothed) began to swim in the falls. Over the next few decades I watched the wooden deck collapse and then rot away. I liked the way the paint peeled in interesting patterns of light blue and deep green. A small bog started in the deep end, with a stand of yellow swamp irises and then some frogs. Abandoned, the pool became mysterious and even dignified, alone in the forest. It was Bard's ruin, a footnote about the passage of time.

As my life became busier the gaps between my visits to the pool stretched from months into years. Then, early last spring, on a day soon after the snow had finally disappeared and the air was unusually warm, I set out to walk the stream from the falls all the way down to its mouth at the South Bay. I never got farther than the pool. Its concrete walls had become a canvas for spectacular graffiti. These were not impulsive scrawls. This work had clearly been carefully planned and executed. A gigantic neon yellow pocket watch, at least ten feet in diameter, covered one of the interior walls. It was ticking away at 11:55, ready to welcome the New Year. 2003 RIP was written near by.

I didn't get back to the pool for several months. On my next visit I was surprised to find a new exhibit. The interior walls had been divided into 10 large murals, one at the deep end, one at the shallow end, and four along each sidewall. There was a hot tropical painting of a languid sunbather stretched across the signature of the artist. A toucan looked on. An intricate calligraphy of box letters in green, gray, blue and neon orange covered the wall at the deep end. (I later learned that these complicated signatures are known as tags in the graffiti world.) Intricate letters exploded into abstract codes. In some of the murals the tag was incorporated into the painting: two dark gray menacing men, one shiftily peering over his tag, the other defiant, his arms crossed in super-hero style and his tag billowing out behind like a cape, eyed each other across the shallow end. They were written in the moody grays, blues, greens and blacks of storm clouds. The shallow end wall flaunted two bold tags: FOSE, in cotton candy pink and purple bubble letters—reminiscent of all those initials we scrawled on our notebooks in middle school—and OKEN, a tag in 3-D letters highlighted in gray, lime green and yellow.

These graffiti writers (I learned that they prefer the term writer to artist) were engaged in a multi-layered conversation with the viewer and with each other. I tried to reconstruct the dialog. Were the little green men with helmets and AMT on their uniforms on the east wall a later addition to the bold red-and-blue, monogram-like tag, transforming it into a mother ship? Was the black boom box written next to the tag at the deep end the commentary of another writer, amplifying the original message? Some of the comments didn't need decoding: First time back. Hot new flavor. My can spits fire. KS is too damn much.

A few weeks later I returned, hoping to find the graffiti artists. A friend had told me they were doing a new piece. I wondered who they were. Individuals? A crew? Local? From New York City? The artists were gone by the time I arrived.

The graffiti gallery is a brazen claim on the old pool. It challenges the careful landscaping that created an idyllic swimming hole in the woods. Everyone I have spoken to who swam there years ago is angry about the vandalism.

Sadly, the artists have paid less attention to the environment than they have to their art. Now the bottom of the pool is littered with over a hundred spray cans. The frogs are gone. The stand of iris is still alive, but one wonders how much longer it will last. The pool isn't just another art space. It's also on its way to becoming a toxic dump.

Whenever I visit I am ambivalent. The graffiti is defiant but, then, the pool itself is a bold human intrusion on the wild landscape. Part of me wants to avert my eyes and hurry by in disgust, but another part feels the pull into the passionate world unleashed by a spray can.

Almost always my more adventurous side wins out. I descend the sturdy metal ladder into the pool and immerse myself in a fierce energy. Strange. Unsettling. Exhilarating. Much like a swim in the falls.